There's fail, there's epic fail, and then there's Sony. You may've thought it wasn't possible, but Sony has just outdone itself on the fail scale, forcing us to add yet another notch. During the congressional testimony this morning, Dr Gene Spafford of Purdue University revealed just how badly Sony managed its Playstation Network servers. It's... Bad.

As it turns out, it is fairly simple to use Google's webcache to show what version of Apache the PSN servers were using back in March. According to a page request archived by Google on March 23, 2011, at that time Sony was running version 2.2.17 of the popular software. You can see from Apache's website 2.2.17 is the latest, stable version of the webserver available even today. This is a direct repudiation of the claims being made that Sony's webservers were out of date by as much as five years.

I have no information about what protections they had in place, although some
news reports indicate that Sony was running software that was badly out of date, and had
been warned about that risk.